Watching Battle Royale for the first time in nearly a decade, and am struck, having just seen both, just how sorry and pathetic a xerox The Hunger Games really is of this film.

Excellent acting, true pathos, a real sense of attachment and emotional involvement with every single one of a 30+ character cast, most of whom were, I believe, younger than those in the US bastardization. Kinji Fukusaku shows what a real director can do with this sort of material: proper camerawork and framing (none of this nauseous shakycam, quick cutaway and overreliance on greenscreen and CG crutches), a much better script, and a more intelligent, far less blunt take on a very similar politicosocial message.

…Further, this wasn’t dumbed down and made “safe” for a pampered YA audience looking for the next emo “hottie” Twilight wannabe – killing is as brutal and disturbing as it would be in the real world (though not overdone, this isn’t a Tom Savini job).

And best of all? The message is realistic. Trust no one, at least not fully. While both recognize where things are headed, with the old and rich eating the young and poor and exploiting them to their own ends (and in both political and entertainment arenas), Suzanne Collins’ silly little lovechild would have us believe that romance and trust will save the day, and that there are no TRUE “baddies”, even in a 1%er dystopia. Even the bad guys are given a backstory, some ambiguity, a rationale, as if they’re just as well meaning as the rest of us. The real world is already showing us quite different.

After wending our way through a number of mediocre films today (the best of which were the Something Weird “weird noir” burlesque/carny oddity Girl on the Run and the 1929 adventure/melodrama The Lost Zeppelin), we just stumbled upon a true gem, on the order of which I haven’t been surprised by since discovering Madam Satan over the summer.

The 1930 talkie the Unholy Three was both Lon Chaney Sr.’s first talking role and his last – he unfortunately lost his life to throat cancer mere weeks after the film premiered. The only positive, if you want to view it that way, was that he was slated for the role Bela Lugosi made famous, in Tod Browning’s Dracula thereafter…

A truly hilarious, snappy dialogue-filled and pre-code contemporary film, it shows Chaney to be everything his mopey, drink-afflicted son failed to be: a good actor, fair ventriloquist and master of multiple voices, intelligent, and quite likeable. In fact, it was positively astonishing to hear the backstory I just mentioned, given his age and vivacity onscreen (he passed at what was for the era a hale and hearty 47). But that’s not the best part. The film’s REAL stars for us were silent starlet Lila Lee (the Germanic Augusta Wilhelmina Fredericka Appel, who hailed from Union NJ of all places) and midget Harry Earles (of the sideshow circuit Doll Family).

Thoroughly modern in a way that surpasses even the sassiest and worldliest of pre-code and/or early 40’s screwball comedy heroines, Lee’s streetwise pickpocket was so devastatingly contemporary, she could easily have passed for a woman of today, were it not for that extra veneer of class sadly lacking on the whole in these days of reality TV style debasement. But she was sassy and declasse enough, with some great lines, comebacks, rude faces and hand gesticulations that left us laughing throughout (and for my part, thoroughly in love with the lady). While her career would continue for another 8 years, this seems to have been her last real “prestige” picture and leading role, being mostly based in the silent era. Did I mention she was damn good looking?

“the fantastic cinema, once at the forefront of adventurous filmmaking, became curiously bland. It was as if every trace of the shadowy and sinister had been banished from the screen. The new fantasy film largely projected uninteresting visions of mindless optimism, reflecting a society that seemed to be experiencing a psychotic retrogression into childishness.

The guilty men behind this noxious trend were Spielberg and Lucas, whose anodyne films seemed to deliberately avoid any psychic depth, and relentlessly focused on the bright shiny surface of things.

The huge success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind was really the death knell of (independent, horror, SF) film. The Lucas/Spielberg film factory churned out safe, unchallenging fantasies of Manichean simplicity, a dreary twelve year old boy’s vision of the universe where machines are neat, girls are icky, and everything moves really fast and explodes.

The brave new world imagined by the Lucas/Spielberg team was strangely devoid of any eroticism, as squeaky-clean and wholesome as a 1950’s TV show – the ultimate reaction to the revolutionary tendencies of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and the very antithesis of the black imaginations of such subversives as Polanski or Bunuel.

As such, the Lucas/Spielberg phenomenon was the barometer of the new social conservatism that dominated the decade yet to come.”